Philippe Descola: Beyond Nature and Culture (2005–)
Filed under book | Tags: · animism, anthropology, cognitive science, culture, ecology, human, metaphysics, nature, ontology, relation, structuralism, totemism
“Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture?
Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a new framework, the “four ontologies”— animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature.”
First published as Par-delà nature et culture, Gallimard, Paris, 2005.
Translated by Janet Lloyd
Foreword by Marshall Sahlins
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2013
ISBN 0226144453, 9780226144450
xxii+463 pages
Reviews: David Berliner (Anthropological Quarterly, 2010), Des Fitzgerald (Somatosphere, 2013), Gildas Salmon & Pierre Charbonnier (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2014), Céline Grandjou (Humanimalia, 2014), Tim Frandy (Journal of Folklore Research, 2014), Michael W. Scott (Anthropology of This Century, 2014), Voytek Lapinski (n.d.).
Book symposium: Lenclud, Helmreich, Feuchtwang, Kapferer, Toren, Lambek, Coelho de Souza, Descola (Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2014, pp 363-443).
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